Tuesday, January 15, 2013

I admit it. I hate points cards stores, but the truth is that the use. This means I have a wallet full of plastic cards of all the stores I visit. To try a little empty wallet, we can use the PassKit.com website, which will help us create our own card Passbook.

Keep in mind that cards are not official, so that the bar code will not work in some stores (as we did in Ikea), so the store clerks have to write by hand. But if you want to test the application, is pretty cool. Let's try to do it with IKEA Family card.

Create your own card with PassKit Passbook

The first thing to do is go to the website of PassKit . You can register for free and get 10 free cards, make up to 100 monthly updates and keep those cards for up to 14 days.

Once registered, you can use the online designer PassKit. It has 5 different types of cards: transit, coupon, store card, membership and event ticket. In our example, as a loyalty card for a store, choose the type "store card".

By clicking the type "store card", the following is to create a name for the template, determine if you want to use a public certificate or upload a private certificate, type the organization name and description for the card, and then determine if you use an automatically generated serial number or enter your own account number. In our example, we have to select "Entered at creation pass" because we just want to create a card with a unique number on it.

PassKit designer guides you step by step through the process of creating the card. The next step is to choose colors and images (in our example we use the orange Ikea puts in their original cards and took their logo to adorn the front). There is a place to put an image horizontally, so I took a picture of furniture Ikea website and put it to decorate the card.

Then it goes to a page where you can configure many factors. We are only interested in entering the card number and stick a barcode although, as mentioned above, will not work. It appears that Ikea uses a standard 39 bar code and the application only generates PDF417, Aztec and QR. No matter, at least we have the card number in our virtual card.

You can add many things. For example, we add automatic updates to the application and launch an alert when we were near an Ikea store. We also added a warning on the back about the non-functioning of barcode.

Finally, you can choose the language and can issue a copy of the card. If you'll use a lot and want to get rid of the limitation of the 14 days, we will have to pay the nominal fee of $ 0.99 via PayPal. Once, with a click of the phone in the URL it generates, the card will be added to our application Passbook.

We assume that the use of Passbook will be extended by major retailers in time, but meanwhile, PassKit is a fun and easy to make us our own cards and lighten our portfolio, as long as the store is willing to go where accept virtual card, of course.

Share this article with your friends on Facebook, Google and Twitter with the buttons you'll find at the beginning of it.Thank you!